


The Blossoming Friendship of Fluff Face and Galaxy Destroyer

by Sp00py



Category: Wander Over Yonder
Genre: Blood, Breathplay, Bullying, Captivity, Claustrophobia, Death(ish), Mild Sexual Assault, Other, Poorly Drawn Pictures, Psychological Torture, Tags to be updated as I add stuff, Torture, headcanons, the shipping's pretty.... loosely applied
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 20:15:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9254807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sp00py/pseuds/Sp00py
Summary: Wander and Dominator have very different ideas of what ‘friendship’ means.





	1. The Invitation

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly just a series of vaguely linear scenes of Dominator being mean to Wander that might or might not conclude. These first two are just copied from my [tumblr](http://spoopywander.tumblr.com). They didn't actually have titles before so they get a stupid one now.

Wander stared at the envelope. It had a dripping heart stamped on it in blood-red ink and had been placed carefully on him while he was asleep. He'd knocked it off when he woke up, and now it lay menacingly on the ground.

He glanced at Sylvia who was still sleeping, tail-to-nose and none the wiser that apparently a Dombot came to visit in the night and _not_ attacked them or the planet’s inhabitants.

He knelt down and gingerly picked it up, then, when nothing horrible happened, opened it. Unlike before when he’d read Dominator’s letter to Hater and gotten the message very, _very_ wrong, Wander took the extra effort to actually focus on what this one said. Fortunately, it was short.

 

> Hey loser,
> 
> I’m curious about this ~~freind~~ friendship thing you have going on. You should come to my ship and explain it to me. Alone. Your Zbornak doesn’t like me.
> 
> Don’t worry. It’s totally not a trap.
> 
> <3 The Vile Lord Dominator

A grin blossomed bright on Wander’s face before he realized Sylvia would absolutely refuse to let him go. For good reason, he knew, but this might be his only chance. He gnawed on his lip, gauging how long he’d have before Sylvia started to stir. Wander gave it about two hours, at a conservative estimate. The sun lingered just below the horizon, its glow visible but weak, and the quiet little forest they’d camped in wasn’t even awake.

He pulled out a pencil and quickly wrote on the envelope that Dominator had invited him to her ship, and he was taking her up on it, and that he’d be back before Syl knew it. Maybe even before she woke up, and she wouldn’t even have to see the note, but if she was reading this that probably wasn’t true so – oh. Wander’s pencil slipped off the edge of the envelope, the side he’d been writing on already filled with his handwriting. He signed the other side and set it against a rock so Sylvia would see it when she woke up, then gave her a kiss on the nose before taking off.

The halls of Dominator’s ship were as empty as ever, with only the distant sounds of Dombots marching and the pervasive hum of machinery to distract from the echoing loneliness. Wander clutched the brim of his hat nervously as he walked along. Everything felt so much bigger than him. Plenty of things were, mind, as he barely topped out at three feet if one was being generous, but today it was more noticeable. Like he was just a tiny part in some grand, malevolent scheme.

After searching the labyrinthine ship, which only reinforced how out of place he was, Wander found Dominator in a dimly lit room with a table, chairs, window, and little else. In the middle of the table was a sculpture of someone in the throes of what Wander had to assume (given his host) was agony, and on the other side of it was Dominator herself, long, green legs slung up on the table and crossed at the ankles. A plate sat in front of her, mostly empty of what looked like some sort of steak and veggies.

The door slid shut behind him.

“Hi,” Wander said, offering a small smile and wave. “I ain’t interrupting your dinner or nuthin’, am I?”

“No, just waiting on dessert,” Dominator said, returning his smile. Hers was far more off-putting. Wander chalked that up to a lack of experience. She straightened and kicked the other chair out for him.

Wander sat down. His feet didn’t even touch the floor, and he swung them restlessly. “I like your sculpture,” he offered. “It’s real… expressive.”

“Thanks. I’ve been getting into art."

Silence fell between them as Dominator poked a broccoli around her plate.

“Sooo, you wanted to talk about maybe bein’ friends?”

She stabbed the broccoli and took a bite out of it. “Sure,” Dominator said around the mouthful. “What’s this friendship deal?”

“It’s just the swellest thing,” Wander said, voice growing stronger at the prospect of not only talking about one of his favorite subjects (only after Sylvia, helpin’ folks, and Hater, respectively) but possibly convincing Dominator to be friends. “It’s a feelin’ like… like home. There’s always someone there for ya, someone you can trust. Someone who cares, and who loves ya. And who you love, back, of course. It’s a two-way street. Friends bring out th’ best in each other, and they help one another, and listen…” Dominator yawned, so Wander searched for something she could relate to. “Like Sylvia ‘n’ me. She’s th’ Zbornak you had so much fun with on Ecumenopolis 3 who really liked ya before that whole tryin’ t’ kill that mob boss fella and lettin’ her almost be eaten thing. We don’t always get along, but I know she’s always lookin’ out for me, especially when I get my fool self in trouble –”

“Does… Sylvia… know you’re here?” Dominator asked, leaning forward and steepling her fingers thoughtfully.

Wander pshawed. “Nah, she’d’ve never let me come. She ain’t too trustin’ of your intentions – no offense. She was sleepin’ when I left, so I left her a note. She really likes her sleep. Almost as much as she likes jellyfish pie.” Wander scrunched his face at the idea of jellyfish pie, then giggled. “Sometimes she dreams she’s swimmin’ in a big ol’ pool of it. It takes all kinds, though, which is why friends are so great! You get t’ know so many different people.”

“I don’t like jellyfish pie, either,” Dominator said, ignoring everything else he’d said about Sylvia. “And you know what? I think we must already be friends.”

Wander perked up. He often found himself people’s friends without much effort or even awareness on his part but hadn’t thought it’d be like that with Dominator. “How d'ya figure?”

Dominator stood up and circled around the table to sit on the edge of Wander’s chair. Her arm slipped casually around his small shoulders. “You’ve already helped me out a lot.”

“I have?”

“Oh, yes,” Dominator said, pulling Wander snugly against her side. He bit his tongue on a happy squeal at the side-hug and returned it, slithering both arms around her waist. He was even more ecstatic when she didn’t pull away or cringe in revulsion. Progress! “I’ve been sort of… following you, and the work you do. So when I found out you were in one of the biggest, best protected, and most populated galaxies I’ve seen? I trashed like three planets, just to celebrate. ”

Wander’s brow furrowed. “Best protected?”

“That idiot Lord Hater had most of this galaxy under his control. I used to be really impressed by that – before I met him. After meeting him, I suspect it was all thanks to that little eyeball guy of his… Anyway. I’m just one girl, and I’m not stupid. I couldn’t take on an entire army the size of his. What it lacked in tech it made up in sheer number and coherence. It spanned solar systems.

“But then _you._ ,” Dominator dug a finger into Wander’s cheek. “You came through and completely wrecked it. He spent so much time, so many resources, just chasing you, that he left almost the entire galaxy unguarded. Those other villains moved in and started taking out his army and each other, and eventually… Well, without you, I couldn’t have come here. So thanks.”

Wander pushed her hand away and wriggled off of the chair.

Dominator let him go, a feline smile on her lips. “Something wrong?”

“I wasn’t doin’ that t’ help you. I was doin’ it for Hatey.”

“Hatey,” Dominator mimicked with a roll of her eyes. “Hater’s a waste of space. But you…” She stood up, and Wander backed up to the door. Or where it had been, at least. He glanced behind him to find only a wall. Dominator loomed ever closer. Wander skittered away to another side of the room, searching frantically for an exit.

“You know what you do best, Wander? Destroy things.” She laughed, not bothering to follow him or stop his search. He could feel her eyes on him, though, like ice prickling between his shoulder blades. “Between that and hating jellyfish pie, we have so much in common. I think we’d make great friends.” Dominator made a sudden sound of revelation, but Wander got the feeling she’d planned this all along. “Oh, how about this: We team up, friendship-style. I point you at a galaxy, you go in, do your love and friendship spiel, dismantle whatever evil empires might stand a chance against me, and I swoop in and just crush everything they love. Then we celebrate. Together.”

Dominator sighed wistfully as Wander crawled underneath the table. It offered some security, however false. “Nothing’d be like this galaxy, though. Our first time.”

Wander poked his head out, a blush hiding under his fur. “What? No! Stop making it weird.”

“Could tell that to Hater,” Dominator muttered as she walked over to the table. She crouched down, and Wander backed away like a startled animal, only to hit against a shifting wall of lava pouring down the side of the table. It closed in on either side until only the place where Dominator knelt was left open. “I thought you wanted to be my friend, Wander.”

“I do, but this ain’t friendship!”

Dominator snorted as the wall began to block her from his sight. “I think you’d better re-evaluate what friendship is if you want to be my friend. Don’t worry, I’ll give you plenty of time.”

The wall sealed up, leaving Wander in a dim red glow that soon faded away into absolute blackness.

* * *

It was clear Dominator had abandoned him for the time being (or forever?), though Wander had no idea how long had passed. Long enough for Sylvia to wake up, surely, and come rescue him –

Or no. She couldn’t win against Dominator, and much as Wander wanted her to kick down these walls and save him, he didn’t want Dominator to get a hold of Sylvia, too. He would be fine, despite whatever Dominator had planned for him. He’d manage. He always had before.

The hat sat in front of Wander, a small electric lamp it had provided without him needing to ask glowing between them. The hat wasn’t much for conversation, but it made a great listener as he rambled through stories, tried playing his banjo though there wasn’t nearly enough room to without knocking the neck or body or his elbows against the walls, and cried with his face buried in its worn, green fabric.

Wander did not do well in small spaces. He’d already rubbed his fingers raw searching for any sort of seam or hidden door and nearly hyperventilated at the idea of having no escape. Never talking to another soul or seeing stars and feeling their light on his fur ever again… There was always an escape, right? He just had to be patient.

Wander wiped his eyes on his arm and sat cross-legged in front of the tiny light. Eyes closed, he focused on his breathing, tried to ignore the press of the walls around him. Breathe in. Breathe out. If the world outside was too small, he’d have to go inside, like the Mooplexians.

Even behind his eyelids, he could see when the light suddenly shifted.

Wander’s eyes flew open.

“No!” he gasped as the electric lamp sank in a circle of suddenly molten floor. “No! Nononono!” The pop of its glass case echoed in the silence as it was enveloped by lava, dying with a flash that left him momentarily blind. His claws scrabbled at the floor where it had been, but the lava cooled, hardened, and again he was in darkness.

Wander reached for his hat. He met air instead and fumbled for it until he hit the wall opposite. He flailed around the tiny tomb, thoughtlessly banging all angles and extremities as he searched for it.

It was gone. Wander’s imagination easily provided several morbid likelihoods for its current location – trapped in an encasement of lava or on its way to an incinerator. His throat tightened, and he suddenly had trouble getting air into his lungs.

“Dominatoooor!” he wailed, though it petered out breathlessly. Wander slumped against the wall, hiccoughs soon taking over as he called out weakly for her, or his hat, or Sylvia. Anyone. The walls felt like they were closing in on him, shifting under his fingers. He half-expected to feel the lava crawling across his fur, encasing him like a vacuum sealed meal.

His chest heaved as he tried, but failed, to regulate his breathing. The wall was warm, at least, and he thought he could feel the thrumming of the ship through whatever technology permeated the lava and made it so malleable to Dominator’s whims. Wander curled up tightly, face tucked against his knees, body occasionally wracked by more clusters of hiccoughs.

Wander could have been there for hours or days and he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference as he drifted in and out of awareness, body settling into a tingly sort of numbness. He fought off the comfortable, cottony stupor as best he could, in case he missed his chance to escape. A chance he wasn’t sure would ever come. It would be easy to just… forget he was here, boxed up in this little corner of her immense ship.

* * *

The wall in front of him melted away, revealing a darkened room and the window, billowing nebulae and stars twinkling just beyond its glass, their comforting light splintered into rainbow fractals by the tears in his eyes.

Wander blinked stupidly at the hole before he realized what it was. It began to ooze closed again as he got his limbs sorted and scrambled for it, just barely falling out before it disappeared entirely.

Dominator caught him as soon as he was out. Her hands wrapped around his torso and lifted him easily from the ground. Wander breathed deeply the cooler, circulating air, then flung his arms around Dominator and buried his face in the crook of her neck, between her hard, pointed spaulders and a layer of white hair that smelled faintly of ozone and oil.

“Wha–”

“Thank you for not leaving me in there!” he cried as though he wasn’t mere inches from Dominator’s ear. Dominator tried pulling him loose, but he’d latched on tight, and finally she just resigned herself to his hug with a sound of disgust.

As soon as Wander’s grip slackened, she pried him off and dropped him unceremoniously onto the ground, then dropped a familiar envelope on his lap. Wander picked it up. The red of her symbol and his scrawled message were overwhelmed by a darker, rustier color.

“Sylvia?”

Dominator shrugged. “I didn’t want her interrupting.”

Wander brought the envelope close to himself, pressed it against his heart like that would stop the sudden and intense ache. _Sylvia_. She wouldn’t have been stopped by just an injury, he knew. And Dominator wouldn’t have stopped at just injuring her, anyway. Oh grop, he’d killed Sylvia.

“Interrupting what,” he said numbly. It’d be rude not to reply, though his brain pointed out Sylvia wouldn’t’ve cared if it was rude. If anything, Dominator deserved some rudeness. But she wasn’t there to judge, was she?

“You know, I hadn’t quite decided. I just sent you that letter because I was bored, and had a few ideas I wanted to bounce off you. I didn’t really think you’d come. Grop,” Dominator laughed. “It even said ‘it’s totally not a trap’ and you fell for it hook, line, and sinker! What an idiot. That Zbornak’s better off dead.”

“Her name is Sylvia!” Wander yelled, jumping to his feet and surprising even himself with his vehemence. “And no she isn’t! Nobody’s ever better off dead!”

“Are you yelling at me?” Dominator asked, voice suddenly low and dangerous. But Wander had never cared to notice danger before, he wasn’t about to start now.

The envelope crumpled in his fist as he continued, brief flash of anger quickly giving way to denial. “You can’t just kill people! Even you can’t be that heartless, right? Y-you didn’t really kill her, did you, Dominator? Please tell me ya didn’t.” Dominator’s hand glowed, the yellow of her glove quickly giving way to the hot white-orange glow of molten lava as he spoke. “Syl liked ya, y’ know? Even had this joke ya told – aah!”

She flung a shot at Wander, who at least had the sense to dodge, only for a bolt of icy cold frostonium to shoot past him and slick the floor.

He slipped and hit the wall with a pained grunt. Wander sat up, a hand to his spinning head, only to have it slam against the wall again as another ball of lava slapped across his face. He pulled frantically at the gag as it hardened, cutting off his air supply.  
  
“I haven’t really had a chance to use my frostonium,” Dominator said as she approached, flurries rising up from her fingertips. “It’s not as versatile as Volcanium X, and I can’t power my ship with it – though the heat regulation’s gotten _so_  much better. All I can really do is more hands-on stuff.” Dominator traced a line of ice down the side of Wander’s face. She caught one of his tears on the tip of a finger, and it froze into a crystalline droplet. Dominator looked at it thoughtfully as Wander struggled for breath.

She pocketed the teardrop then covered the hand still clenching the envelope with her own. Slowly, ice began to creep across Wander’s fur, a bone-deep ache settling in where it touched until his entire hand was covered in ice. It crawled up his neck and down his ribs, and eventually his entire arm was frozen to his chest.

“It’s a good thing I’m a hands-on sort of girl,” Dominator said pleasantly as she melted a few holes into his gag, giving him a thin stream of much-needed air. The viscous lava dripped onto his tongue and rolled hot and threatening toward his throat before cooling.

 _Cold_ wasn’t something Wander was familiar with. It was death and stillness and isolation, none of which he had much personal experience with by his nature or deliberate design. His fur was dense and warded off even the chill of space, and he’d always had Sylvia to cuddle up against if the loneliness ever got to be too much. It ached right into his lungs and felt like he was breathing shards of glass with every whistling gasp.

After she decided he was covered in enough ice, Dominator stood and held out her hand for him to take with his free one. When Wander didn’t, she manually laced his fingers with her own.

“Come on, I’ll show you what I mean,” Dominator said. She all but dragged him out of the room, as he couldn’t seem to get his feet under him or counter the unfamiliar weight of ice and lava on his body.

“You should consider working with me, so we don’t have to do this,” she continued conversationally as they walked. “Just do what I say, and I’ll be your, ugh, friend. We both get what we want. Seems like a sweet deal to me.” Wander whined behind his gag, and Dominator cocked her head as though listening. “What was that? Oh, right. Nothing, because you can’t talk. Thank grop for that.”

She led him to a familiar, intimidating room that radiated heat from the slow-flowing cascades and bubbling pools of lava. The only other time Wander had been here, he’d almost been dipped head-first into one of those pools, and, worse, he’d had to watch Dominator gleefully grind Hater’s heart to a pulp. He had a lot of mixed feelings about that incident, still, but couldn’t process the sudden surge of memory on top of what all he was going through now.

Dominator’s throne climbed higher even than last time, it seemed. A collection of sculptures had been added to the path leading to its stairs, a few crawling pitifully up them. People in pain seemed to be the main theme, along with small, broken flowers all across the ground. Most were in black, bulging lava, but some were ice that somehow managed to survive the oppressive heat of the room.

Wander’s hat was on one of the statues nearer the stairs, and his wordless noises pitched upward in intensity. He yanked on Dominator’s grip, gesturing bodily toward his hat.

“Huh? Ah, right. That’s the one I wanted to show you.” She led him over to the statue, occasionally commenting about others they passed like they were at an art gallery and she was the artist presenting her pieces, before stopping in front of the one with Wander’s hat. She shoved him into the statue. He just barely caught himself on an outstretched, lava-dipped arm. Dominator considered the tableau before nodding decisively. “It’s definitely my best work yet.”

Wander didn’t want to look at what she’d made, but his curiosity had always been a weakness. He gave a muffled scream and fell away, scrambling to hide behind Dominator’s legs. He risked another glance, as though the first one had been mistaken, before burying his face in her black skirt.

Sylvia stood before them, face contorted in pain and dripping great black drops of lava, lending everything a skewed, exaggerated quality. It didn’t take a genius to guess what was inside that statue. He had no clue how long Sylvia had been like this, but Wander had been crushed in Dominator’s lava before and had only been smothered for moments before he’d run into serious breathing problems. His imagination easily supplied how horrible it must have been.

Dominator disentangled Wander from her skirt and knelt in front of him to get his attention like she was talking to a child. She cupped his face in her hands, and the ice began to thaw, the gag began to melt. The lava painted a blistering trail from his mouth to around his neck, but Wander didn’t have any energy to care. Boiling lava, freezing ice – after a certain point, they felt about the same.

“Do you see now? You did this, Wander. You do hurt people.”

Wander looked down at the ground as water dripped down his fur. A few teardrops joined the puddle growing at his feet as his arm fell to his side, crushed envelope falling loosely to the ground.

He knew Dominator was lying, intellectually. She’d done this, not him. Wander hadn’t asked for this, and couldn’t have known it would happen. But emotionally… he’d all but pulled the trigger. Sylvia would still be alive if she hadn’t been friends with Wander.

He refused to hurt more people, especially because he tried to help them. Hater – he’d do fine on his own. He had Captain Tim and Mr. Peepers and didn’t need Wander. He’d never needed Wander, much as Wander wanted to be needed, and they never should have met, if what Dominator said was true. And Sylvia… Sylvia wasn’t out there anymore. She was right in front of him. Wander couldn’t leave her again.

When it was clear Wander wasn’t going to go anywhere, Dominator stood up, leaving Wander grasping at her arm like she was going to leave him, too. She plucked the hat from Sylvia’s head to plop it on Wander’s. It slipped down over his face, as though to shield him from her gaze, and Wander readjusted it.

“That is one stupid-looking hat,” she said as though she wasn’t standing in front of his best friend’s corpse. “But it suits you. Since you’re stupid, too. Hah.”

Dominator picked him up and left the gallery. She took Wander to her bridge, where she sprawled in her chair, tucking Wander up against herself like he was a pet. A few clicks on her control panel and maintenance logs rolled onto the screen. As she scrolled through them, her other hand scratched gently at the back of Wander’s head.

Wander curled up and buried his face against Dominator, trying to pretend she was Sylvia. Her curves and softness and smell were all wrong, but there wasn’t anyone else.

Stupid, stupid, _stupid_ Wander. He shouldn’t even call himself that anymore. That had been Sylvia’s name, and she wasn’t ever going to call him that again.

* * *

Dr Screwball dashed frantically back and forth, trying to get his teethbots under control. They clicked and rattled and cackled all over, most pouring out into space as Sylvia raised Cain in his ship.

“Where is he, you flabdrassin’ banana?” she yelled, flinging a door that used to be attached to the wall at Screwball.

He just barely dodged out of the way and cringed as it hit one of his experiments, bringing the entire thing crashing to the ground in a shower of sparks, confetti, and glass. “Who? Wander? I don’t know!”

“You’re lying! I woke up and found _this_ instead of Wander.” She brandished a toothbot at Screwball, before chucking it at him. It hit him right in the face, and he only barely caught it in his mustache. It had his screwball symbol stamped clear as day on it, and to the untrained eye looked just like his current project, but Screwball knew his own handiwork, and this wasn’t it.

“I didn’t leave this.”

“Then who did, the _other_ comedy-themed villain?”

“Ooo, there’s another one?”

Sylvia growled and yanked on her comb like she wanted to rip it out. “No! That’s why I’m here! But…” she trailed off, looking over the destruction she’d wrought on his ship. “Wander’s not here, is he?”

“No,” Dr. Screwball said a little sadly. “I wish he were.”

Sylvia sighed, looking out the hole she’d punched in his ship at the vast darkness of space. “Me too. Where are you, buddy?”


	2. The Artist

The last of the escape pods blew up trying to vacate the planet’s orbit, and the pitiful little people that had been in them were picked off one by one by Dombots. Dominator crowed and turned to rub it in Wander’s face, only to find him not occupying his customary space beside her chair. The manacles, which she could have sworn were tight enough to cut off circulation were empty. There was a large enough spattering of his spacey blood and fur to suggest his escape had not been painless, at least, despite how silently he’d done it.

But he’d missed a show she’d put on specifically for him. Rude. Dominator blasted a smaller Dombot out of her way as she stalked out of the control room. There were very few places Wander could be, and Dominator didn’t even have to check his tracker to guess which he had slunk off to. He was cute, in a muppet-y sort of way, but not that smart. When you looked past his gross compulsion to help people, Wander wasn’t really anything more than some weird little pet.

Dominator suspected that was what he’d been to Sylvia, whose ‘body’ he refused to leave for too long. His hat stuck out amid all the angry hues and black swaths of her throne room, marking where he’d yet again latched onto the Sylvia statue she’d made. He would have been on her back, arms wrapped around her neck, but after the first few times of finding him there, Dominator had put a line of ice spikes all down the statue’s body. Now he was wrapped around her feet.

Dominator crouched, arms draped loosely over her knees, as Wander turned his head to regard her sadly.

“You missed me picking off the Arkenians one by one after draining their little planet dry,” she whined. “Why are you even here if you’re not going to watch me work?”

“I don’t wanna see that.”

“You’re no fun.” Wander scrambled to the side as Dominator slumped dramatically against Sylvia’s leg, but before he could get too far she’d caught him in her hand and brought him to sit on her lap. “So how should I make you fun?”

“We… we could play a board game.” Wander reached up into his hat with an arm, Dominator was pleased to see, that had long scrapes all along it and patches with fur rubbed off. He pulled out a cardboard box. She knocked it out of his hands, sending the pieces scattering everywhere.

“No.”

“Okay. Make music?”

Banjo. Into the lava. Hadn’t she already destroyed that? It was like he had a never-ending supply of hick-y instruments.

“Draw?”

Dominator raised her hand to smack the crayons and paper away, then paused. Wander cringed, anyway. “Sure. Let’s draw.”

“Really?” Wander’s momentary suspicion gave way to a smile as Dominator nodded. “Well, uh. What do you want to draw?”

Dominator reached her arms around Wander to open his box of crayons. She picked out orange, black, red, blue, and green crayons, then took a sheet of paper and shoved Wander off of her lap. The rest of his papers and crayons scattered, and he set about trying to corral them. “I’m not saying ‘til it’s done, but I need you to pose for me.”

Wander straightened, supplies clutched haphazardly in his arms. “What sorta pose?” he asked warily.

Behind him, a pillar of lava rose out of the floor, and, before Wander could register it, a section shot out and grabbed him around the middle. His crayons and paper went everywhere, some rolling off the platform and sizzling to nothingness in the lava.

“What're you doin’?” he yelped as smaller sections grabbed his limbs. One slipped up under his hat and caught the little tufts of fur on his head.

“Instead of explaining, I figured I’d just do it myself,” Dominator said, hands moving like a conductor’s controlling the stand’s arms. “You’d be all like 'no, Dominator, that ain’t right’ like a prude, anyway.”

She ignored his protests as she twisted him around, trying a few things out. “There,” Dominator said. “That’s what I want to draw.”

“This ain’t right!” Wander cried, causing Dominator to roll her eyes at his predictability.

She’d positioned him with his face shoved into the ground, arms held down. His hips were lifted high enough that his toes barely scraped the floor. “If this sort of stuff didn’t get you so flustered, I wouldn’t do it,” Dominator explained as she settled down to draw. Even telling him exactly why she did these things didn’t ever stop him from vocalizing every pathetic emotion he had, just giving her more to work with. “So really, you only have yourself to blame.”

“No, I mean – she’s right _there_ ,” Wander said, voice snuffly and a little muffled by the floor.

Dominator looked up from her paper at the Sylvia statue. “Y'know, somehow I don’t think she cares.”

Wander whined, and Dominator shifted his position a bit, splaying his legs a little wider as he pulled against the stand’s hold. The quiet was soon filled only by the bubble of lava, the scribble of crayon, and an occasional sniffle from Wander. He was learning, slowly, not to put up too much of a fight.

Dominator considered her picture then stood up to hunt down a purple crayon for the final touch. “Cute underwear,” she said as she tossed the crayons into the lava. Dominator slid the picture in front of Wander’s face.

 

“What do you think?” she asked as she knelt behind him and passed her phone off to an arm of the stand.

“That’s an… awful lot of red,” he said weakly.

Dominator looked up at the screen and put one hand on Wander’s hip. The other made a rude gesture as she pretended to thrust against him while her phone snapped pictures. The arm handed her phone back to her.

“It’s called 'artistic expression’, Wander. Don’t you want me to express my creativity?” she said as she looked through the pictures.

“I guess… It’s just –”

“Everyone’s a critic. Just be happy it’s only on paper. For now.” Dominator picked the best picture from her phone, then sent it to Lord Loser without any explanation attached. She snatched up her drawing like she cared enough about his opinion to be mad and left. The stand dissolved, leaving Wander to sprawl out with a hand to his head, woozy from his blood flow leveling out.

Dominator went back to the bridge to pull up the footage of her earlier destruction and wait for Wander to inevitably return. Hater was blowing up her phone, which would provide at least a few minutes entertainment.

“Heh,” she said as she scrolled through his increasingly frantic and horrified messages but made no attempt to respond. It really was the small things that made this fun. And Wander was just so, so small.

Something touched her leg hesitantly, and she looked down. Wander stood there, holding a piece of paper out for her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t very encouragin’ of your self-expression,” he said as she took the paper.

 

It was a picture of them holding hands with big, cartoony smiles on their faces in a sunny, flower-filled field, colored with crayons Dominator  _knew_ she’d thrown in the lava. She might not have much artistic ability, but it was leagues beyond Wander’s.

“Aww, that’s so cute,” she said sarcastically, earning a hopeful look from Wander, who apparently couldn’t pick up on her tone.

Dominator held it up in one hand and a small flame flared on her fingertips on the other. Wander’s eyes widened, but then she put it out, and he breathed a quick sigh of relief. “You know, that _was_ fun. Let’s put our pictures somewhere nice.” Dominator leaned forward and pinned them to her console, then patted her lap invitingly. When Wander just stood there, she leaned over and picked him up.

“And now that you’re here,” she continued, wrapping a hand around the back of his head when he tried to bury his face in her chest. Dominator twisted his head painfully to look a the screen. “Let’s rewatch me destroying Arken. It’s great.”


End file.
